The Questions to Thalassius

The Quaestiones ad Thalassium (Questions to Thalassius, c. 630–634) is St. Maximus the Confessor’s largest exegetical work: sixty-five responses to scriptural difficulties submitted by Thalassius, a Libyan abbot. This file treats the work’s form and occasion, its critical editions and translations, and its governing themes — the pleasure-pain dialectic by which the Fall propagates itself (Q. 61), the two senses of “sin” that arose in Adam (Q. 42), and the meditation on providence and judgment that runs through the whole.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Form and Occasion

The Quaestiones ad Thalassium belongs to the years Maximus spent in North Africa, most likely c. 630–634, before the Monothelite controversy consumed his energies (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996, ch. 1; Blowers and Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, PPS 25, introduction). Its addressee, Thalassius, was a Libyan priest-monk and abbot, a friend and correspondent of Maximus, who had sent him a list of obscure or difficult scriptural passages with the request that they be resolved. The work is Maximus’s answer: a prologue setting out the spiritual presuppositions of the whole, followed by sixty-five questions and their responses, several of them swelling into small treatises and trailing scholia (marginal notes preserved in the manuscript tradition).

The genre is that of the erōtapokriseis — “questions and answers” — a recognized form of late-antique Christian literature, in which a teacher resolves difficulties for a disciple. But Maximus transforms it. Where the form typically yields brief, catechetical solutions, his responses open into sustained theological and contemplative reflection. The difficulty (aporia) of the text is not an embarrassment to be cleared away but an occasion for ascent: the labor of interpretation is itself spiritual exercise (Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy, 1991). This is why the work cannot be read as a reference commentary; it is, in form and intention, a school of contemplation conducted through Scripture.

The questions range across both Testaments and are often deliberately strange — why the unclean animals of Leviticus, what the “coats of skins” of Genesis 3:21 signify, how to read the prophet Jonah, what the numbers and measurements of the tabernacle mean. The obscurity is the point. Maximus chooses (or accepts from Thalassius) passages whose surface yields nothing edifying until the interpreter is driven beneath it.

Editions and Translations

The critical edition is that of Carl Laga and Carlos Steel, Maximi Confessoris Quaestiones ad Thalassium, in two volumes: CCSG 7 (Questions 1–55, with the Latin version of John Scotus Eriugena) and CCSG 22 (Questions 56–65), published by Brepols in 1980 and 1990. This supersedes the older text reprinted in Migne (PG 90:244–785), which remains the conventional citation anchor for column references.

Two English translations are standard. Blowers and Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ (Popular Patristics Series 25, 2003), translate a selection — including the crucial Questions 21, 22, 42, 60, 61, and 64 — with introduction and notes. The complete work was rendered by Fr. Maximos Constas, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios (Fathers of the Church 136, 2018), the first full English translation, made from the CCSG text and supplied with the scholia. Citations in this compendium give the question number first (stable across all editions), then PG 90 where a column is verified, then the translation consulted.

The Pleasure-Pain Dialectic (Question 61)

The theological heart of the collection is Question 61, Maximus’s analysis of the origin and transmission of the passions, occasioned by 1 Peter 4:6 (“the gospel was preached also to the dead”). Here Maximus argues that when God created human nature he did not implant in it sensible pleasure and pain; rather, he furnished the nous with a “spiritual capacity for pleasure” — the natural longing of the mind for God, by which the human being was meant to enjoy God ineffably (Maximus, Ad Thalassium 61 [PG 90:628]; trans. Blowers and Wilken, PPS 25).

The first man, however, “at the very instant he was created,” squandered this capacity: turning his senses outward, he activated an unnatural pleasure through the medium of sensation, fixing on the things of the world the desire that was owed to God alone. This is the original disorder. And because God in his providence attached pain to disordered pleasure as its corrective and chastisement, human existence after the Fall is locked into a self-perpetuating cycle: the pursuit of sensible pleasure issues in pain, and the flight from pain drives the renewed pursuit of pleasure (Maximus, Ad Thalassium 61; trans. Blowers and Wilken, PPS 25; Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy, 1991). Mortality — the whole apparatus of pleasure-seeking and pain-fleeing centered on the body — is thus the engine by which the fallen condition reproduces itself across the race.

The Christological payoff is decisive. Christ assumed human nature with its capacity for pain but without the disordered pleasure at its root: born without the pleasure of carnal conception, he could die a death untainted by the cycle, and so break it from within. By accepting the pain (the passibility and death of fallen humanity) while refusing the pleasure (the self-love that originated the Fall), Christ reverses the polarity — turning the very instrument of condemnation into the instrument of salvation (Maximus, Ad Thalassium 61; trans. Blowers and Wilken, PPS 25). The pleasure-pain dialectic is, for Maximus, the precise mechanism through which both the Fall and its undoing operate.

The Two Senses of Sin (Question 42)

Question 42 supplies the conceptual key to Maximus’s whole doctrine of the Fall, and it is the locus of his sharpest formulation of what Orthodox theology calls ancestral (as against Augustinian original) sin. Asked about the meaning of 2 Corinthians 5:21 (“he made him to be sin who knew no sin”), Maximus distinguishes two senses of “sin” that arose in Adam:

The first is the culpable sin of free choice (hamartia in the proper, blameworthy sense): Adam’s voluntary turning away from the good, the deliberate misdirection of the will. This is sin in the strict sense, and it is personal — it attaches to the one who commits it.
The second is the blameless “sin” of nature: the passibility, corruption, and mortality (phthora, thanatos) that followed upon Adam’s choice and entered nature involuntarily. This is “sin” only by extension — the consequence, not the guilt.

It is the second, Maximus insists, and not Adam’s personal culpability, that is transmitted to his descendants. We inherit the corruptible, passible, mortal nature; we do not inherit the blame of Adam’s act, which belongs to him alone. Blame attaches only to each person’s own deliberate misuse of the will (Maximus, Ad Thalassium 42 [PG 90:405–409]; trans. Blowers and Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, PPS 25). This is precisely why Christ could assume the “blameless passions” — hunger, thirst, fatigue, fear of death, mortality itself — without contracting sin: he took the natural “sin” (corruptibility) without the culpable sin (the disordered will). The distinction safeguards both Christ’s sinlessness and the reality of his solidarity with fallen humanity, and it underwrites the whole Orthodox refusal of inherited guilt (see Theological Anthropology).

Providence and Judgment

Running through the Quaestiones is a sustained meditation on providence (pronoia) and judgment (krisis) — the two complementary modes of God’s governance of creation and history. Providence is God’s ordering of all things toward their good end; judgment is his just apportioning to each being of what its condition requires, including the corrective pain that follows disordered pleasure. The two are not in tension: judgment is providence’s instrument, the means by which God turns even the consequences of the Fall toward the healing of the creature (Maximus, Ad Thalassium, prologue and Q. 61; Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy, 1991). The numerical and figural details of the difficult passages — the measures of the tabernacle, the ages of the patriarchs, the unclean animals — repeatedly resolve, under Maximus’s reading, into figures of this providential pedagogy: God leading the soul, through the discipline of created things, back to himself.

Representative Questions

A handful of the sixty-five give the flavor of the whole:

Q. 21: on the Word’s “becoming sin” and the reversal of Adam’s transgression — the Christological inversion of the Fall.
Q. 42: the two senses of sin (above).
Q. 61: the pleasure-pain dialectic and the origin of the passions (above).
Q. 63: an extended anagogical reading of the lampstand of Zechariah 4, the seven lamps as the operations of the Spirit.
Q. 64: the prophet Jonah read anagogically — Jonah as a figure of Adam, of humanity’s passions, and of Christ, the three-day burial in the sea-monster prefiguring the descent and the resurrection (Maximus, Ad Thalassium 64; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996; see Exegetical Method).

Each begins in a textual perplexity and ends in contemplation — the consistent rhythm of the work, and the reason it reads less like a commentary than like a manual for the soul’s ascent through the letter of Scripture.

References

Maximus the Confessor. Quaestiones ad Thalassium. c. 630–634. Greek text in PG 90:244–785; critical edition Laga and Steel, CCSG 7, 22.
Blowers, Paul M. Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor: An Investigation of the Quaestiones ad Thalassium. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.
Blowers, Paul M., and Robert Louis Wilken, trans. On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor. Popular Patristics Series 25. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003.
Constas, Fr. Maximos, trans. St. Maximos the Confessor: On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios. Fathers of the Church 136. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018.
Laga, Carl, and Carlos Steel, eds. Maximi Confessoris Quaestiones ad Thalassium. CCSG 7, 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 1980, 1990.
Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. London: Routledge, 1996.
Thunberg, Lars. Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor. 2nd ed. Chicago: Open Court, 1995.